Madison Griffiths’s probing new book begins with “a curiosity worth sweating over.” She’s on the other side of a relationship she had in her early twenties with a man who was once her university teacher. In Sweet Nothings she wants to explore “whether or not it was a love worth defending, both institutionally and socially,” given that it left her “bitter and confused.”
Now in her thirties, Griffiths has established herself as a welcome feminist voice who brings perceptive sensitivity to her investigations into reproductive rights, violence against women and children, and abusive relationships and their aftermaths. With her professional and personal background, she is, in vital respects, the ideal author of a book-length contemplation of the thorny topic of men in universities who sleep with their younger, female students. Griffiths purposefully focuses on this most commonplace of student–teacher relationships, fruitfully analysing them as a “gendered phenomenon” that is both “part of the sexual economy of academic institutions” and “symptomatic of a larger cultural mess.”
While she returns to it intermittently, Griffiths doesn’t dwell for long on her own experience. Casting her net on social media for personal stories, she received “hundreds of responses” and settled on “four tangled accounts of power, lust and learning” to which she felt “an immediate, unshakeable pull.” Partly to preserve their anonymity, she assigns these women pseudonyms — Blaine, Elsie, Cara and Rose — and fictionalises elements of their accounts.
Creative non-fiction also allows Griffiths to imbue each of these women and their stories with the kind of interiority, character and specificity more often found in novels than in conventional reportage. This approach helps to centre the women’s own accounts of their lives, and in parts is reminiscent of American writer Lisa Taddeo’s bestselling Three Women (2019). Elsewhere, the narration can clash with the entwined saga of Griffiths writing the book and wrestling with the subject matter.
Of the four women, Rose leaps most vividly off the page — perhaps because, as Griffiths writes, they recognise elements of themselves in each other. Both “wriggled” their way into higher education “out of a small, plodding town on the outskirts of Melbourne.” And each of them sought in their own way to orchestrate the “undoing” of an ex-boyfriend.
In Rose’s case, the ex is Samuel, her “teacher-turned-lover,” a “hardly-as-bad sort of man,” with whom she had a four-year relationship marked by the usual milestones. Rose was the first student Samuel pursued, but certainly not the last. While they were still together, albeit in diminished form, an anonymous complaint was made about his “inappropriate behaviour with female students,” and later Rose filed her own report of a “historical act of sexual misconduct.” The portrait of Rose — seething with anger, but also somehow reborn — is Griffiths at her best.
Blaine, Elsie and Cara take longer to come into proper view, though each of their stories offers new angles and insights. Blaine is now an academic herself, and one of her colleagues is the teacher with whom she had a clandestine affair when she was a PhD student. Back then, Greg “minced her thesis to bits.” Years later, she’s “immediately repulsed” when she receives an “out-of-the-blue” message from him to thank her for introducing him to her own student, Jenna.
While Elsie was in a relationship with her forty-something tutor Harrison during her twenties, “the two had discussed the concept of grooming at length” and “while wrapped in each other’s bodies, decided that this wasn’t that.” Two years later, she’s not so sure. Cara, meanwhile, “the kind of woman men slump at the feet of,” never had sex with her teacher Ivan. But she is still compelled to share her story, not just about “cartoonishly dorky” Ivan, with whom she spent chaste nights in his candle-lit apartment, but also about other men she wasn’t supposed to be drawn to, who took advantage of her attraction to them.
These are important and fascinating stories, deepened by the passing of time. But Griffiths, despite what are clearly very good intentions, sometimes gets in their way. Aside from the four women, she talks to a wider range of people — others with experiences to share, academics, her boyfriend, casual acquaintances — but these conversations can be as distracting as they are enlightening. She makes an especially powerful detour into what good teaching entails, but other lines of inquiry are left dangling or could have more effectively been brought together.
At one point, Griffiths writes that “I don’t want this book to be muddied with question marks.” But Sweet Nothings is saturated in questions. On the one hand, this is understandable — consensual relationships between adults involving power differentials and a duty of care are an ethical minefield — but the ruminations can tip over into self-indulgence. The key arguments, though, are delivered directly: “For a student to feel entitled to justice, they must first feel entitled to care.”
Given the subject matter, and the book’s concern with questions of “sex and power,” Sweet Nothings has inevitably been compared to Helen Garner’s controversial The First Stone (1995), a book Griffiths confesses to finding “at least a little compelling.” But where Garner represented universities from her outsider perspective as sites of feminism-gone-wrong and overreach — places where decent men can easily and swiftly be disproportionately punished for minor transgressions — one of the central achievements of Sweet Nothings is to show a different dynamic.
Thirty years on from The First Stone, whether the issue is sexual harassment or sexual misconduct or worse, the current systems appear to be overwhelmingly inadequate, over-burdened and/or non-existent. Perusing universities’ codes of conduct, Griffiths is rightly “struck by the obscurity of their language, how up-in-the-air they seem.” Both Rose and Elsie lodge complaints with their universities’ Safer Communities offices — a process implemented across the sector in recent years to support student safety — only to end up in months of limbo. For Rose, the support of a senior feminist academic withers to nothing.
In this respect, Sweet Nothings is a worthwhile companion to feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s blistering Complaint! (2021). Rose comes to learn that “for every man who keeps his job, a woman is burdened with another, more back-breaking job: the job of becoming the complainant.” And, unlike Garner in The First Stone, Griffiths puts the women right up front.
Griffiths asks us to take seriously the question of whether relationships between university teachers and their students should be banned, as some universities have already done. Where some feminist thinkers (or outliers) like Jane Gallop back in the 1990s, and more recently philosopher Agnes Collard, have celebrated the eros of pedagogy, Griffiths follows Amia Srinivasan, the author of The Right to Sex (2021), in asking whether good teaching and real love can co-exist. While mindful that some of these relationships can mature and flourish like any other, Griffiths and her informants show that it is the younger women who most often bear the brunt of the fallout.
If at times Griffiths overburdens the reader with details of her labours — “I will wake in the middle of the night, vexed, feeling like a hyphen between two words” — ultimately it was worth the effort. Sweet Nothings is a thought-provoking and welcome intervention. •
Sweet Nothings: Power, Lust and Learning
By Madison Griffiths | Ultimo Press | $36.99 | 320 pages
